


Castles in the Sky

by orphan_account



Category: Men's Football RPF
Genre: First Meetings, First Time, Language Barrier, M/M, Self-Discovery, Shyness
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-09-15
Updated: 2011-09-15
Packaged: 2020-01-05 20:22:07
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,686
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18373400
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/orphan_account/pseuds/orphan_account
Summary: Gonzalo takes his first journey alone, to Northern France, to help him to make his next choice. When he gets there, he ends up making several choices.





	Castles in the Sky

"Parlez-vous français?" He had been alone. He had been alone for several days now, it was the longest time that he'd ever been away from his family and he was the furthest he had ever been from home.  
  
It had felt liberating, if unusually quiet. He was shy but he liked being surrounded by laughter, loud conversations and arguments even if he didn't take part in them. But this was something he had to do, and even though his parents had offered to come with him – his older brother too – he needed to do it alone.  
  
This was how he had found himself sitting on the soft but dry sand of a beach in Northern France. The weather wasn't summery, in fact compared to what he was used to it was very cold. He had pulled his jacket closer around him as he stared out to the sea. The tide was coming in, and the sea was rough with a slight tinge of brown from the sand it was churning up. He might be a city boy but he could watch the sea forever, it helped him take his mind off the decisions he needed to make.  
  
But then this boy had arrived. He had seen him briefly for the past few days, from the window of his room, walking past on the way to somewhere that Gonzalo didn't know. Today, when Gonzalo was staring out of that window, trying to write a letter home about what he was doing, the boy had gone past. As on the other days, the boy was wearing huge headphones, swaggering along but today this only continued until he saw nobody was watching him. Gonzalo hadn't been noticed from his vantage point and he had seen the other boy change into a more normal walk, relax his shoulders and stretch his arms, cracking his knuckles as he did. He brushed his hand over his head, and then had gotten his phone out of his pocket to check it. Whatever he was reading, it made him smile, and he would have thought from the tough guy image this boy was projecting that his smile wouldn't be as small and shy as it was. Then he frowned, as if he could feel someone watching him, and he had moved away from the window. By the time he had looked back, the boy was gone.  
  
Now he was standing next to him, watching him intensely as Gonzalo tried to work out wherever he should get up from his sitting position to match his height, and how to reply to his question.  
  
"Non." The other boy raised his eyebrows, and he should have felt a little intimidated but he didn't and looked back to the sea again. He heard movement and then the other boy was sitting down next to him, his head resting on his knees and his arms wrapped around his legs. The silence between them felt slightly awkward - Gonzalo wished he was able to say something but he doubted that the boy next to him spoke any Spanish. He could ask.  
  
“¿Hablan usted Español?” The boy frowned at him, his dark eyebrows even more furrowed and despite himself Gonzalo laughed. He continued to frown but then cracked a smile and looked back to his knees.  
  
Gonzalo smiled to himself as he turned the collar of his jacket up. The silence was still a little tense but he didn’t feel intimidated by it - he felt that he was sitting next to someone like him, who let himself get washed away by the conversation of others without truly taking part. It might have not mattered even if they did share a language.  
  
The boy next to him said a few more words, and even if he understood French he had mumbled so badly that he wouldn't have understood. From the silence that followed he could tell that he hadn't expected a reply. Then he heard distant laughter, high pitched and excitable, as a group of children ran up close to where they were sitting, one of them carrying a beat up football under his arm.  
  
They chattered and argued among themselves, he looked over as one boy marked out two goals in the sand and a haphazard game of beach football began. He smiled and looked back to the sea. He remembered playing like that, before football became a serious job instead of something to do for fun. He knew not everyone got the chance to play professionally and he was grateful that he’d been lucky enough to get that chance, but he still found himself envious of the lives of his friends who could eat what they wanted, go out partying every night and didn't have to get up early on Saturdays to train.  
  
Something rolling into his back broke him out of his thoughts, and he looked behind him to see a beaten up football behind him, the "FRANCE 98" still barely visible on it. He pushed himself off the sand – feeling the gaze of the other boy on him – as he turned to face the ball, and trying to not put too much force behind it, passed it back over to the group.  
  
His eyes met the dark eyes of the other boy, who was watching him as if he knew, knew exactly who he was and what football was to him. Then one of the boys ran over, and tugged at his coat jacket, blabbing in French and tried to pull him over to the other players. He let himself be taken away, although unable to break his eye contact with the dark eyed stranger who had a look in his eyes that suggested something he didn't understand.  
  
With a mixture of pantomime and pointing, Gonzalo managed to come to an understanding with the other footballers, although what position he was suppose to be in was unclear (probably none in a game like this). As the game restarted and a small blonde boy took a shot at goal from the other end of the make-shift pitch, he saw out of the corner of his eye one of the girls in the group going over to the young man he'd been sitting with before. The girl, despite being much shorter and possibly ten years younger than him, was appearing to try to bully him into playing with them. At first he tried to ignore her, then tried to dismiss her, and then had gotten up and come over with her, defeat as clear on his face as victory was on hers.  
  
The ball landed at his feet just as the other boy arrived, giving him another look that he didn't understand and made his stomach turn in an uncomfortable way, and without thinking he aimed at the goal and shot, the ball whizzing past the kids and several metres down the beach. The kids around him look at him agog, clearly aware that he was better than their parents had been when they played with them, and the boy didn't looked surprised as he felt his face go slightly red as he ran down the beach to reclaim the ball, shooing away an interested dog as he did. He had slipped up, he hadn't meant to play so hard against a team of kids, but that look had unnerved him at the final moment.  
  
Dribbling the ball back, he passed over to the other boy, who flicked the ball up with his feet, bounced it off his head and then kicked it over to a small boy with glasses when it came back to him. The kids started to clap and asked him questions in furiously fast French as Gonzalo smiled at him, aware that here was someone else who was at least a youth player, and that they might have more in common than a tendency towards shyness and silence.  
  
The match continued, and it wasn’t clear who was winning. It didn't seem to matter to the kids, and it felt strange to play again without the result being important, even training matches brought bragging rights at the very least. Gonzalo had scored again but this time it was a light tap-in, one that the boy who seemed to be playing as goalkeeper might have be able to save instead of one that shot down the beach. The other teenager had scored too, and the control he'd had over the ball, before putting it in lightly to be fair to the other players like Gonzalo had, suggested to him that he played as a striker too.  
  
As the ball was kicked away by accident towards the sea again, a girl, probably no older than fourteen, walked over to the match in progress, with the sour look of someone who'd been asked to do a chore they absolutely hated. She yelled for one of the players, a small sandy haired boy who’d been playing as some sort of midfielder, and the two of them started to argue, the boy being reluctant to do whatever it was she was asking, and the teenage girl still had that sour look, mixed with annoyance as the boy refused to go back with her.  
  
Sensing that it was time that the match ended, Gonzalo started to walk away, in the direction of the guest house he was staying in, but he was stopped by a hand on his arm. His heart jumped a little when he looked behind him, he hadn't realised that the other boy could move as fast as he had to reach him. It shouldn't have been a surprise that another footballer could move that fast, and yet it had. He asked him something in French, and he tried to guess at what he wanted. The boy started to mime, and through it Gonzalo realised that he wanted to hang out with him for a while longer. Gonzalo thought of the unfinished letter on the table of the room, a letter that he had to send soon unless he wanted his mother to worry about him, and started to make his excuses, excuses that were far safer than spending more time with this boy who gave him that strange feeling in his stomach.  
  
He wasn't taking no for an answer. He continued to insist, almost pleading with him, and Gonzalo realised that this boy, just like the swagger he had walked with until nobody was there, was probably lonely by himself here, just like he was. He agreed, and the other boy had smiled, relief clear on his face, and Gonzalo wondered if his face was always this easy to read. The boy had then said something that he understood.  
  
"Je suis Karim."  
  
"Gonzalo." Karim says his name to himself, repeating the familiar syllables in a way that’s completely unfamiliar to Gonzalo and sends a slight shiver up his spine for reasons he wasn't not sure about. Karim lets go of his arm and motions with his head towards the town, his eyebrows asking the question more effectively than words would have. Gonzalo nodded, even though he wasn't completely sure what he was agreeing to.  
  
As they walked away from the beach, all the kids they’d been playing with gone or going home, Gonzalo noticed that they had left the ball behind. He picked it up and looked at it. It had to be one of the most beaten up balls he'd even seen, well used and seeing as it had been abandoned, not particularly well loved. He passed the ball to Karim, who gave him a look that said "what am I suppose to do with this?" He shrugged; it was more likely that Karim would get the ball back to those kids than he would, since he was leaving in a few days. Karim shook his head but tucked the small ball under his arm regardless with a sensitivity that contrasted with the swagger in his walk when he started walking again. Gonzalo almost thought he seemed ridiculous but there was something about that mixture of toughness and vulnerability that spoke to him; god knows he'd had to pretend to be tough when he only felt vulnerable before.  
  
He noticed as they walked down the narrow, cobble-stoned streets that led away from the sea that Karim started to get tense. It was clear in the way that his shoulders drew in. Gonzalo wondered what he was tense about, and if he should be worrying about it too. He bit his lip as they walked through the streets in the direction of the town square, with its cafes, small shops and its centre piece, the fountain in the middle built by a famous seventeenth century sculptor. But before they reached it Karim stopped, appearing even more anxious and tense, and Gonzalo looked up to see the window of the room he was staying in. He wondered if Karim had stopped here on purpose, if he had known where he was staying, as if he had known that he had been watching him from the window each time he had passed by.  
  
Karim frowned as he saw people coming, and looked around as if looking for somewhere where he could hide. Gonzalo realised that Karim didn't know that he'd been staying here or had been watching, but that he was trying to avoid somebody, and that whoever that somebody was, they were coming this way.  
  
Gonzalo moved to the door and unlocked it with the key he'd been given, and motioned for Karim to follow him in. He didn't miss the grateful look on his face but tried not to show that he'd seen it as he followed him in and he shut the door. His eyes adjusted to the darkness of the reception compared to the relatively lightness of the daylight outside, and he reached for the hand of the boy next to him, but stopped before taking it, not sure why he was doing it – it wasn't so dark that he had to lead him by the hand, and he wasn't sure how Karim would react to it.  
  
Karim's response was to take his hand, and gave it a light squeeze. Gonzalo looked at him to try to read his face but he was looking down at the ground, so with his hand in his, Gonzalo led him up the narrow stairs to his room. Even when he’d unlocked the door and let Karim in, he hadn't let go of his hand and he tried to not give too much thought to it.  
  
Karim had other plans though, as he let go and used his now free hand to lock the door shut. The soft click of the lock sounded to the Argentine like the loudest noise in the world as he looked at Karim. The old battered football dropped to the ground with a thump. He hadn’t been sure what to expect, so when Karim had taken his head in his hands and they had looked into each other's eyes, Gonzalo had been just as surprised when he'd lent in and kissed him as if he'd done anything else.  
  
The kiss was something new and unexpected, but the smell of the other boy, so close to him now as his hands moved down from his head to his shoulders, was familiar. It didn't feel familiar in an everyday sense but like he had smelt it once in a dream, a long time ago, like the smell of the night opening flowers had invaded his dreams in his family's holiday home.  
  
He moved backwards as Karim pushed forward, not moving his mouth away from Gonzalo’s as they fell backwards onto the bed. But now that Karim was on top of him, the unfamiliar weight in a way comforting, he broke the kiss and looked at Gonzalo, his eyes clouded with lust but betraying the underlying uncertainty he was feeling.  
  
He had come here to clear his head, to find out what he wanted without outside distractions crowding his mind, to find out how he felt when he was really alone and if he could cope with it. He had come to finally make a choice. This was not the choice he had come all this way for, but it was one he also had to make. No, it was one that he wanted to make, and maybe had already made, when he’d let him sit down next to him at the beach, maybe even when he'd seen him from the window for the first time. He moved his hand and stroked Karim's face, brushing the pad of his thumb under those dark eyes that looked more certain by the second.  
  
Karim kissed him again, this time even more intensely as his hands ran down his body, clumsily reaching his zipper and tried to pull it down while his tongue continued to explore his mouth. When he got it down and reached inside Gonzalo’s underwear, the Argentine’s head snapped back as he took him into his hand and started to pump. He moaned as Karim kissed his neck, keeping up the pace as he muttered words that he didn’t understand into his neck, the vibrations against his skin adding to his arousal.  
  
That hand continued to pump, thumb brushing over the tip and he felt his mind become even hazier, until he realised we a start that the hand had moved away. He let out a whine he’d tried to keep in as he looked down to see why he’d stopped. He saw the other man trying to work his jeans down fully, and he helped him, pushing them down with his pants until they slid off around his ankles, leaving his bottom half completely exposed. He shut his eyes as he heard Karim move around, the soft noise of his sweatpants coming down, and something that crinkled being put down on the bed. Then he felt a cold finger at his entry and his head snapped back again.  
  
The finger slowly eased its way in, and was slowly joined by a second that stretched inside him even more. He felt himself leaking precum as the fingers started to slowly fuck him, and sped up, a third finger joining in to fill him up even more. Then the fingers pulled out and he found himself empty as he heard a wrapper being opened, then his name being whispered.  
  
"Gonzalo." He opened his eyes, his vision hazy and his face flushed as he looked at the other boy. He had his hand on his cock but again, that vulnerable nervous expression was on his face that showed that he wasn't a pro at this, that this experience was as new to him as it was to Gonzalo. He tensed up a little, realising that shit, that was going to go inside him and it was a lot bigger than his fingers, but steadied himself with a deep breath. He wanted this. He nodded but the other boy didn't smile this time and he looked even more serious as he lifted Gonzalo's legs, the Argentine wrapping his arms around them to keep them up as Karim spread him apart again and pushed in.  
  
Gonzalo shook as he felt himself being split by Karim's cock. He started to pump, in and out, achingly slow at first until Gonzalo couldn’t hold back his moans anymore, landlady be damned. Then he sped up, until Gonzalo had his arms and legs wrapped around Karim's back, repeating his name like a mantra, karimkarimkarim, something to hold onto as he felt like he was losing his mind.  
  
Then Karim hit that spot inside of him and it was all over as he came onto his stomach. Karim groaned as Gonzalo tightened around him, and he let go as Gonzalo muttered "ay dios" to himself. He pulled out and pulled the condom off, tying a knot into it and throwing it in the bin by the bed (Gonzalo would have to fish that out later, the landlady was nosy).  
  
Karim tiredly kissed him and lay down next to him. If they had shared a language, Gonzalo would have asked "now what?" but considering what the answer to that might be it was probably that he couldn't. So Gonzalo let the little death wash over him as he felt asleep next to this stranger, of sorts.  
  
When he woke up, the sun had set and Karim was gone. He found a short note on his desk, next to that unfinished letter. Using the dictionary his mother had insisted on him bringing with him, he was able to decode it.  
  
_"Gonzalo,_  
_Be brave and make the right choice._  
_-Karim."_  
  
He wasn't sure what Karim was referring to, if somehow he knew what had brought him here. He probably didn't, it was far-fetched but it struck him regardless. He knew what choice he had to make. It was not the easy one, but it was the right one.  
  
He wanted to thank Karim but he didn't see him again after that day, even though he watched out of his window, just in case, every day until he left.  
  
  


* * *

  
_Three years later..._  
  
"And this is our other striker, Gonzalo Higuaín." Raúl was introducing them as if they were strangers, as if Gonzalo didn't know who this young shy French striker, who had been brought by all accounts to replace him, was.  
  
He got up from the bench, and took the hand that was offered to him. His face didn't betray any emotion at first - he'd been through them when he'd heard the news that Karim had signed - but as he shook his hand he couldn't help but smile. At first Karim seemed confused, but then he did that little smile as he let go of Gonzalo's hand.  
  
Raúl smiled paternally, pleased to see the two strikers having such a good first meeting. As Raúl led Karim off to finish meeting the rest of the team, Gonzalo sat back down and started to lace up his boots. Well, he thought, this should prove interesting.


End file.
